You’re Not As Behind With AI As You Might Think

OK, so when I take a break for lunch (which happens to be my breakfast, too, since I do intermittent fasting)… I sometimes sit down to watch a little Youtube. 😇

And because AI has definitely been a big matter of interest for me lately, I have AI videos showing up in my recommended feed all the time.

It is a total hype machine. Everybody with shocked faces. People saying you can build a $50K business in 10 minutes with these 7 magic prompts.

Bunch of bullcrap.

Because there is no “magic prompt” that makes these things generate magic for you. And these videos are so surface-level… making it sound so incredibly easy when the reality is much, MUCH different.

And that disconnect is the motivation for this week’s issue of WP Edge.

In the world of WordPress right now, AI is the big topic. They’re all talking about it. But it is a learning curve learning exactly how it all fits together. And it is made harder when the hype machine is throwing you every distraction it can.

So, let’s dive into that a little more…

The One-Person Business Has Never Been More Powerful (Or More Overwhelming)

Right now, if you open YouTube and search for anything related to AI and business, you will be absolutely buried in content telling you that you’re behind.

Everyone is running a $77K/month solopreneur operation with four AI agents and zero employees. Everyone built their entire marketing funnel last Tuesday using a tool that didn’t exist six months ago. Everyone is scaling to seven figures while you’re still trying to figure out how to get your autoresponder sequence to stop sending the welcome email twice.

I’m being a little dramatic. But only a little. 🤪

Here’s my honest experience right now: I AM genuinely trying to integrate AI more deeply into how I run Blog Marketing Academy and Concierge. Not in a theoretical way — actually doing it, figuring out what works, building real workflows. And even with all the time I spend on this stuff, I still constantly feel like I’m behind.

Which is a weird feeling. Because I’m actually making real progress.

The Hype Machine Is Not Your Benchmark

The content you see online about AI — especially on YouTube — is optimized for one thing: CLICKS. And nothing gets clicks like “I built this in 10 minutes and made $50,000.” Halfway decent chance they’re not even telling you the truth.

What you don’t see in that video: the three hours of troubleshooting before the recording started. The subscription fees to four different tools. And honestly? There’s a decent chance some of these creators haven’t even fully done the thing they’re demonstrating — they’re showing you the concept, glossing over the messy details, and banking on the fact that you won’t notice. Because here’s the thing: if that AI workflow was really generating them $50K a month on autopilot… why are they spending their Tuesday making YouTube videos about it and making stupid looking thumbnails of themselves with their jaw hanging wide open? 😄

Always remember, the format rewards hype… and punishes any talk of real-world friction. And that’s real.

So if you’re watching these videos and then looking at your own business and feeling like you’re somehow failing — stop. You’re comparing your behind-the-scenes to someone else’s highlight reel. You may even be comparing to a lie. That’s a losing game no matter what the topic is.

This Lesson Isn’t Even Really About AI

This isn’t unique to AI.

It happens with marketing strategies. With social media. With course platforms. With SEO. With literally any space where there’s an active creator economy producing content about how to do the thing. Someone is always doing it better, faster, and with more dramatic results than you. That’s just how these ecosystems work.

What changes is the pace. And right now, AI is moving at a pace that makes everything else feel slow. New tools drop every week. Models get updated. New features are dropped. The noise-to-signal ratio is genuinely exciting — but rough.

Which means the skill that matters most right now isn’t knowing every tool. It’s staying grounded enough to make steady progress in your own business without getting knocked sideways every time something new shows up.

Make Headway In Your Own World

Let’s talk about overwhelm for a second, because I think it’s worth understanding what actually causes it.

Overwhelm isn’t just “too much stuff.” It’s too much stuff moving in too many directions with no stable center. That’s exactly what the AI landscape feels like right now — a constant churn of new tools, new workflows, new promises, none of it anchored to anything.

The fix is to stop making the hype machine your center and make your own business your center instead. When your business is the fixed point — its goals, its gaps, its actual customers — everything else becomes easier to evaluate. Does this solve a real problem I have? Does it move my business forward? If not, it doesn’t matter how many views that video got.

And here’s something worth saying plainly: you’re probably not actually behind. If you’re actively integrating AI into your business at all, you’re already ahead of most. It just never feels that way — because the hype machine is specifically designed to make you feel behind. That’s the hook. There will always be people doing more than you. Stop letting them set your benchmark.

Small, grounded progress in your own business beats frantic, scattered adoption every time.

One Practical Thing: Build Yourself an AI Sounding Board

Here’s something I’ve been experimenting with that might help you stay on track without getting flustered. I even started doing this when it comes to my health… since I built a “health coach” inside of Claude now. 🤪

Set up an AI project — in Claude, ChatGPT, wherever you work — specifically as a thinking partner for your business. Not to do tasks, but to help you stay oriented or evaluate ideas.

Give it some context to work with: what your business actually does, who you serve, what your main goals are for the next 90 days, what tools and workflows you currently have in place, what you’re trying to move toward. A few paragraphs is plenty. Save that as the project instructions.

You can even have your AI interview you, ask questions — and propose changes to those project instructions so it gets better. You iterate. Those project instructions aren’t static and it isn’t fully up to you to dream up the right words to say.

The AI isn’t magic. It doesn’t have some special wisdom about your business that you don’t. But it will reflect your own goals back at you and help you pressure-test whether the new thing you’re excited about actually fits your situation — or whether you’re just caught up in the hype cycle again.

Think of it less as an assistant and more as a mirror. One that knows what you said your priorities were last month and can gently point out when you’re about to chase something that has nothing to do with them. 😄

The Bottom Line

The one-person business really is more capable than it’s ever been. The tools available right now are genuinely impressive, and the gap between what a solo operator can accomplish versus a team has narrowed in real ways.

There has never been a better time to be a solopreneur. It truly is amazing. 🤩

Keep your head down. Make your operation a little better each week. And stop watching what everyone else is doing long enough to actually do the work.

That’s the move. 💪

WordPress News & Updates

Woo Subscriptions Bug Silently Killed Renewal Payments For Years. Four bugs in WooCommerce Subscriptions were quietly flipping automatic renewals to manual — meaning customers’ saved payment methods weren’t being charged, with no notifications going to anyone. Woo has patched it and released a diagnostic tool, but updating the plugin alone doesn’t fix already-broken subscriptions in your database. If you run WooCommerce Subscriptions, go check. Full breakdown at The Repository.

WordPress 7.0 Confirmed For May 20. After the earlier delay, WordPress 7.0 has a firm new release date. The main unresolved question is which storage architecture will ship for real-time collaboration — four options are being tested by hosts, with Mullenweg making the final call. More at The Repository.

Someone Turned WP-Admin Into a Desktop OS. WP Desktop Mode is a new WordPress plugin that replaces the standard wp-admin with a macOS-style desktop interface — movable windows, a dock, a taskbar, the works. It’s per-user opt-in, reverts cleanly on deactivation, and it’s already generating a lot of chatter in the community. Genuinely fun, and maybe even useful depending on how your brain works. WP Desktop Mode on GitHub.

ASE Adds a Full Backup and Migration Suite. Admin and Site Enhancements — the plugin that already replaces a dozen others — has added a serious backup module to its Pro tier. We’re talking scheduled incremental encrypted backups that handle 10GB+ sites, one-click restore, point-in-time restore from incrementals, and direct site-to-site transfer with automatic search-replace. There’s even a WordPress-based cloud storage option built in. If you’re already running ASE Pro, this is worth a look before you renew another dedicated backup plugin. Full details at wpase.com.

FluentCRM 3.0 RC-2 Is Out. The second release candidate adds a frontend portal so contacts can manage their own profiles and preferences, a cleaner bulk-selection UI, contact pagination up to 600 per page, and a solid round of bug fixes. Stable release is getting close — details on the WPManageNinja community.

LearnDash Joins Liquid Web — And MemberDash Is Now Built In. LearnDash is moving under the Liquid Web by Nexcess umbrella alongside Kadence, Give, and The Events Calendar. The bigger news: MemberDash is being folded directly into LearnDash on future plans, adding membership tiers and content gating natively. Existing plans are grandfathered with no immediate changes. More from the LearnDash team.

OttoKit Adds Forms, Tables, and Variables. OttoKit shipped three new features at once: native forms for capturing leads without webhooks, built-in database tables for storing automation data, and global variables for centralizing reusable config. The pitch is a complete capture-to-automate pipeline without stitching in external tools. Full details at ottokit.com.

SEOPress Insights 3.0: Faster and More Flexible. A meaningful update — custom database tables replace the old postmeta storage for significantly better performance, per-keyword Google location targeting is now available, and there’s a new drag-and-drop dashboard plus keyword import from Google Search Console. Release notes at seopress.org.

Contact Form 7: Not Dead, But Let’s Talk. After social posts suggested CF7 was entering end-of-life, creator Takayuki Miyoshi clarified: version 6.2 is still coming this summer, and even the “feature freeze” after 6.3 is something he might reverse. Still — a plugin that’s slowing development alongside a rapidly evolving WordPress is worth having a plan around. His full clarification.

FluentCart Release Week: Five Updates in Five Days. FluentCart shipped five releases in one week: advanced inventory management, bulk stock updates with activity logging, S3 and Cloudflare R2 storage for digital products, a one-click EDD migration tool, and page browsing history tracking per order. If you’ve been watching this WooCommerce alternative, it’s moving fast. See what shipped at fluentcart.com.

There Is No “Magic Prompt” — Here’s How to Actually Make AI Useful

There’s a whole cottage industry online built around selling you the perfect prompt.

“Copy these 7 prompts that will 10x your productivity.” “The exact ChatGPT prompt I use to write all my content.” You’ve seen them. They’re everywhere. And they feed a specific anxiety that a lot of people have when they first start using AI: I’m not getting good results because I don’t know the right way to ask.

Here’s the thing. That anxiety is mostly misplaced — and the “magic prompt” content is largely hype dressed up as a shortcut. The secret to getting genuinely useful results from AI isn’t finding the perfect prompt someone else wrote. It’s ITERATION. It’s treating the setup of any AI project as a process that gets better over time, not a one-time configuration you either nail or don’t.

It’s a Conversation, Not a Form

The hype machine acts like AI is a vending machine. Put in the right input, get out the right output. And when the output isn’t great, they assume they punched in the wrong code.

But that’s not how this works. AI is much more like a new team member who’s smart but doesn’t know your business yet. You wouldn’t hand a new hire a one-page document on day one and expect them to operate perfectly forever. You’d work with them. Correct them. Give them more context as it became relevant. And over time, they’d get better at what you need.

Same principle applies here.

Start Messy. Seriously.

If you want to set up a project — whether it’s an AI business sounding board like I described above, or an assistant for a specific recurring task — don’t wait until you know exactly what to write. Just start with a brain dump.

What I do is start up a new chat and then brain dump what I have in mind for it to help me with. If I know this will be something I will use over and over, I tell it so and I tell it I’m working to create a project. I tell it my initial goal is to create good, reliable project instructions for the job… and even a memory so that it knows what I want over time.

You can actually have AI help you use and develop your own AI systems.

I do it all the time. When I start these things up, I honestly have no earthly idea how to do it right from the get-go. But I work with the AI to train itself.

Let the AI Rewrite Its Own Instructions

Here’s the part most people don’t realize they can do — and it changes everything.

After you’ve been working in a project for a bit, you can tell the AI to update its own instructions. Just say something like: “Based on everything we’ve discussed, can you give me an updated version of the project instructions that would help you serve me better?” It’ll produce a revised, more complete version. You copy that, paste it back into the project settings, and now the project knows more about you than it did before.

Rinse and repeat. Every few sessions, do a quick update pass. Each time, the instructions get a little more thorough, a little more tailored, a little more yours. After a few iterations you’ll have project instructions you genuinely could not have written yourself from scratch — because they emerged from actual use rather than a planning session.

This is what iteration actually looks like. Not agonizing over the perfect starting prompt. Just using it, noticing what’s missing, and improving it over time.

One Thing That Makes This Way Faster

You don’t have to type your face off. You can SPEAK to it.

Dictation tools have gotten really good, and using one changes how fast you can get context into an AI app. Many of these AI tools have built-in options to use voice mode and talk to it. Sometimes, it can be a little slow, though.

I use Superwhisper personally, which sits in the background and transcribes whatever I say almost instantly. You just talk, it types. Other solid options include Wispr Flow and the built-in voice input on your phone if you’re working mobile.

The practical upside: instead of laboriously typing out your business context, goals, and background, you just… talk. The way you’d explain your situation to a consultant over the phone. It’s faster, it comes out more natural, and you end up giving the AI richer context than you’d ever type out manually.

Remember, these AI tools are basically large LANGUAGE models. The more LANGUAGE you give it, the richer context it can work with. Even if the text you dictate into AI isn’t the way you would have typed it to your high-school English teacher… it not only doesn’t matter, but it makes the AI do its job for you BETTER.

The Bottom Line

Stop chasing other people’s prompts. Start building your own context — messily, iteratively, over time. Let the AI help you refine it. Use your voice if typing slows you down.

The goal isn’t a perfect setup on day one. It’s a setup that gets a little better every week. Sound familiar? 😄